Proposes that a systematic program of summary writing may be particularly effective tool for helping students overcome egocentrism by requiring them to focus objectively on someone else's ideas. Describes a program of summary assignments that foster dialectic thinking. (HTH)

Synectics, the making of analogies, was used with learning disabled high school seniors to provide them with a creative process that aids in developing a deeper understanding of literature. After studying Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the students completed a six-step process and produced a short writing assignment. (VW)

Describes writing assignments that help students make the transition from concrete to formal operations. The assignments confront the writers with an idea or piece of experience, ask them to respond to it and how they arrived at this response, and what other responses could be made by them or by someone else. (HTH)

To do academic work, basic writers must know how to use the forms that express mature thinking. Accustomed to the demands of speech, basic writers often rely on unspecified context to relate ideas, thus failing to establish the connections evident in well-developed thought. While able to use certain cohesive ties such as repetitions,…

Describes an assignment to focus students' attention on the thinking process in which students write dialogues that reproduce concretely the dialectic movement of a formal argument. Includes a more advanced exercise in which students' address the remarks of literary critics. (HTH)

Students write a great deal during their school years, but they apparently never realize that writing affects their lives outside of school and can often even be important to their success. Research on the composing process has enabled teachers to separate the writing process from its product, but theory, practice, and research still focus on the…

The process of getting a thought out of the mind and onto paper can be divided into five major categories: (1) discovering the word, (2) excavating the mythic word from the subconscious, (3) perceiving the word in the conscious, (4) verbalizing the expressed word, and (5) comprehending the unsaid word. When humans experience anything, their minds…

Focusing on techniques for teaching students to integrate diverse ideas at a deep level of cognitive processing, a study evaluated an idea integration package for teaching writing in the college classroom. Subjects, 29 college students from an introductory psychology class at a Utah university, were divided into two groups. The integration group…

The brain gets fed first! That is an important idea that directly relates to the nutrition/cognition connection in schools. As the education community faces the challenges of childhood obesity, malnutrition of the brain, food allergies, disorders of metal metabolism and biochemical imbalances, educators are eager to learn about how to guide…

This curriculum guide is designed to aid in the planning and execution of a writing course for verbally gifted elementary school students. The course is designed for students ranging in age from 8-11 years whose verbal reasoning skills are at least 3 years above grade level. The course instructs students in the fundamentals of communication…

This article suggests several proven strategies to help students move beyond the knowledge-telling stage of writing to the knowledge-transforming approach, which involves not only putting one's knowledge into words but the reflection upon, revision, and improvement of that knowledge. Eleven references are listed. (DCS)

The implicit assumption behind personal writing assignments given at the beginning of a writing course is that personal essays eliminate the writing apprehension of having nothing to say. However, college freshmen find it very difficult to write about themselves and their own opinions because this writing involves abstract mental processes and…

Noting that teachers sometimes fail to draw on students' prior knowledge, this guide focuses on helping teachers both to think about the cognitive processes involved in learning and to design activities that provide students with a solid introduction to various learning tasks. The first section briefly discusses current theory and research in…

Discusses the rationale and attributes of the whole-language approach and applies it to secondary social studies instruction. Describes assessment strategies used with the whole-language approach and maintains that evaluation of student writing helps prepare them for appraisal in the workplace. (CFR)

Asserts that economics can be taught more effectively at all grade levels using the whole-language approach. Describes the role of teachers, students, and the instructional process in the whole-language classroom. Discusses student evaluation using portfolios and includes a portfolio description table used in an economics class. (CFR)